A common question among marketers is: What content is best at each stage of the buyer journey?
As account-based marketing (ABM) becomes more integrated into multi-channel strategies, understanding the right content and messaging for each stage is crucial. Tailoring your content to address the specific needs of prospects at different points in their journey helps build stronger connections and drives conversions.
But what really makes your content marketing strategy stand out? And how can you ensure your content captures attention, delivers value, and resonates with your target audience at every stage of their buying process?
Let’s dive into how to optimize your content across the funnel for maximum impact.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic approach used by marketing professionals to attract, retain, and inspire a specific audience by delivering valuable and relevant content like relevant blogs, videos, podcasts, eBooks, social posts, and other media. This is achieved by creating and distributing content that solves problems for prospects and customers, meeting them where they are in their buying journey. Effective content marketing often incorporates search engine optimization (SEO) as a key tactic to ensure content reaches the right audience by improving visibility in search results.
A few key objectives of B2B content marketing are:
- Build trust and credibility: Make your brand a go-to source of information. Create enough credibility so customers choose you when ready to purchase.
- Drive business results: Use data-driven insights to create impactful content that increases B2B engagement, drives conversions, generates leads, and demonstrates measurable ROI.
- Provide value: Deliver content that addresses your audience’s specific pain points and questions. Offer actionable insights, solutions, and resources that make their lives and jobs easier.
Types of Marketing Content
In today’s busy world, grabbing buyer attention is harder than ever. To stand out, you need to offer a variety of marketing content types, each designed to engage and inform your audience in different ways. Great content creation can take many forms, let’s look at the different types of content:
- Articles: Short-form content like blog posts, op-eds, bylines, and interviews that provide valuable insights and attract traffic to your website.
- Long-form content: In-depth resources such as white papers, eBooks, or guides that offer detailed and actionable information that builds credibility and trust.
- Interactive content: Engaging tools like templates, checklists, quizzes, or calculators that allow your audience to actively participate, making their experience engaging and personalized.
- Sales enablement: Content that supports the sales team and encourages stronger sales and marketing alignment. This could include competitor analysis (presented as landing pages or PDFs), customer testimonials, product information, or objection handling assets to help guide and support sales conversations, and lead to a more cohesive buying experience.
- Courses: Educational content like certification programs offer in-depth learning that can help position your brand as a thought leader. For example, HubSpot offers a variety of marketing certification programs.
- Case studies: Real world examples of how your product or service can help solve your audiences’ problems or pain points.
- Social media posts: Short, digestible content designed to engage your audience and start conversation across social channels like LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, X, Reddit, or YouTube.
- User-generated content: Content created by your own audience such as reviews, photos, or testimonials that showcase your brand as a leader and build trust and community.
- Infographics: Visual representation of data or topics that make information easier to visualize and share.
- Podcasts: Audio content that often offers industry insights, interviews, or stories that can connect with your audience on a deeper level.
- Webinars: Live or recorded video sessions that provide valuable information and insights into specific topics and showcase your brands expertise.
- Video: By providing clear and actionable information, video—especially short-form video—helps accelerate the decision-making process by educating buyers about solutions and trends in a succinct and digestible format.
As you create your content, keep in mind content repurposing strategies. Transform your existing content into new formats, such as turning an eBook into a series of social media posts or repurposing a podcast episode into a TikTok clip. This strategy maximizes the value and reach of your content, making it ideal for use across different platforms and engaging a wider audience. Moreover, it ensures that your messaging remains clear and consistent across multiple channels and platforms.
Marketing Content Within the Funnel
Content marketing works best when your content focuses on meeting buyers right where they are in their buying stage progression. Identifying the best content for each stage of the funnel, whether it’s building awareness, nurturing leads, or driving conversions, is essential to creating content that resonates and drives impact.
An ABM content strategy takes this a step further by focusing on the entire buying group, ensuring the right content is in place to boost brand awareness and generate demand. To visualize this, we’ll break the funnel into three core stages:
- Top-of-Funnel (TOFU)
- Middle-of-Funnel (MOFU)
- Bottom-of-Funnel (BOFU)
Below, we’ll explore how to adapt your ABM content aligned with buyer intent data for each stage of the funnel, and the most effective content formats to use.
Top of the Funnel: Build Awareness
The goal at the top of the funnel is to ultimately attract customers and build awareness. At this stage, prospects are becoming aware of your brand, while searching for solutions for a challenge or problem they have. Your content should help them understand how to address and overcome those challenges effectively.
The key challenge here is making sure you attract the right prospects and customers. The solution lies in having a clearly defined Ideal Customer Profile and Target Account List to make sure you are targeting the right audience.
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Describes the characteristics of a company or organization that is a perfect fit for and would benefit the most from your product or service.
- Target Account List (TAL): A list of potential accounts that are most likely to convert and closely aligns with the overall business growth strategy.
This is where account-based marketing becomes essential. With an ABM approach, this means crafting content that appeals to key decision-makers within your ideal accounts and ensuring it aligns with their industry-specific challenges and objectives. With the help of intent data, you can focus your content marketing efforts on the accounts that are actively researching solutions in your industry. This helps you identify accounts conducting research and the specific terms they’re searching for and create content that directly addresses those needs, ensuring it’s timely, relevant, and effective at capturing attention.
TOFU Intent Signals
By using intent data, you can identify accounts conducting research and the specific terms they’re searching for. This helps create content that directly addresses those needs, ensuring it’s timely, relevant, and effective at capturing attention.
These intent signals might look something like:
- High-level research activity: Accounts searching for general information or introductory content related to your industry, products, or services.
- Keyword searches: Searches focused on understanding challenges or exploring potential solutions. For example, “how to improve lead generation” or “top ABM tools”.
- Content consumption: Engagement with blogs, educational articles, beginner-level guides, and infographics on third-party sites or your website.
- Social media interactions: Accounts engaging with your social posts, liking or sharing thought leadership content, or commenting on general topics.
Most effective TOFU content formats:
With this insight in hand, you can create in-depth, long-form content and other resources that are hyper-relevant, positioning your brand as a trusted advisor to those early into the buying journey. Let’s look at some of the content that might be most effective in engaging TOFU buyers.
- Analyst reports: Authoritative, third-party research that provides in-depth insights and validation, helping build credibility early in the buyer’s journey.
- White papers: Detailed long-form content that dives into industry trends or challenges, offering solutions and positioning your brand as an expert.
- eBooks: Comprehensive, downloadable long-form resources that provide valuable educational content to help prospects better understand key topics or solve problems.
Middle of the Funnel: Teach, Don’t Preach
The middle of the funnel is all about informing and engaging prospects without aggressively promoting your brand. At this stage of the funnel, content shifts from building broad awareness to creating deeper connections and providing valuable insights and solutions tailored to prospect’s specific needs.
However, the middle of the funnel can be a challenging stage. Your leads are diverse, each looking to solve a unique problem and each at a different point in their buying journey. They’ve shown interest in your brand but aren’t quite ready to make a decision.
Here, an account-based approach provides the framework needed to overcome the complexity of the MOFU stage. With B2B solutions consisting of six to ten decision-makers, ABM provides insight into the roles and priorities of everyone involved in the decision-making process, enabling you to deliver more personalized buyer experiences that resonate with the entire buying committee. Additionally, ABM content syndication allows you to nurture key accounts by delivering relevant content at scale, ensuring your messaging reaches the right people at the right time, and guiding them through their buying journey. By tracking account-level activity, ABM tools can help tailor your content and messaging, ensuring that each decision-maker receives the most relevant information.
MOFU Intent Signals
At the middle of the funnel, intent signals help you gauge where prospects are in their journey and how to engage them effectively.
These signals might look like:
- Engagement behavior: Prospects interacting with content related to specific challenges or features of your solution.
- Frequency of interactions: Repeated ABM engagement, showing increasing interest in your offerings.
- Content preferences: Downloads of resources like white papers, participation in webinars, or consumption of videos.
By analyzing these signals, you can better understand where prospects are in their journey and tailor your content to meet their needs.
Most effective MOFU content formats:
At this stage, the focus shifts to providing educational content that continues to address prospects’ challenges while gradually positioning your product as the ideal solution.
The most effective content formats include:
- Buying guides: Comprehensive resources that help prospects navigate their decision-making process.
- Blog posts: Blog content provides detailed insights into key industry topics, trends, and solutions to common problems.
- Demo videos: Showcasing your product or service in action to highlight its value.
- Email marketing: Targeted emails with personalized content that nurture prospects and provide further value.
- Events: Opportunities for prospects to engage with your brand in person or virtually.
- Webinars: Interactive, informative sessions that educate and guide prospects through their journey.
Bottom of the Funnel: Why You?
At the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), an account is nearly ready to make a final decision, it just needs to be persuaded that your product is the right solution. The main goal of the BOFU stage is to convert prospects into customers.
At this stage, your prospects are more inclined to speak with a sales representative. When this conversation happens, the sales rep should be equipped with insights gathered from the prospect’s behavior throughout the funnel. This includes:
- What are they researching?
- Which contacts have they interacted with?
- Have they seen or interacted with any digital advertising?
- How many individuals from each account have engaged with your content?
Leveraging an ABM approach helps strengthen this process. Marketing helps track and capture the right signals, while sales teams can leverage this data to have more informed, relevant conversations with prospects. With this alignment, sales reps can use targeted content such as case studies, ROI calculators, or product demos to continue the conversation and reinforce the value of your solution. This content not only supports the sales rep’s efforts but also ensures the conversation is personalized, timely, and likely to result in a conversion.
BOFU Intent Signals
As prospects near the bottom of the funnel, they’re showing clear signs of being ready to make a purchase decision.
These intent signals might look like:
- High engagement: Prospects are showing strong interest by revisiting your content, interacting with multiple pieces of information, or engaging with sales offers.
- Pricing page views: Visits to your pricing or plans page indicate serious consideration of your product or service.
- Social proof: They may be looking at social proof such as case studies or testimonials to validate your solution.
- Contacting sales: Reaching out to your sales team directly or scheduling a demo/meeting.
By tracking these signals, you can identify when prospects are truly ready for a more direct sales conversation and tailor your outreach to meet their needs in this critical stage.
Most effective BOFU content formats:
At this stage, content should directly support the decision-making process, focusing on reinforcing why your product is the best choice.
Effective BOFU content formats include:
- Comparison guides: Highlight the strengths of your product against competitors, showcasing why it’s the best solution.
- Case studies: Provide real-world examples of how your product has successfully helped similar organizations.
- Product user guides: Offer detailed, practical information on how your product works, helping prospects envision using it in their own business.
- Live demos: Show prospects exactly how your product works in real-time, answering any specific questions they might have.
- How-to-guides: Step-by-step instructions that explain how to get the most out of your product.
- Interactive content: Tools like ROI calculators or trials engage prospects by allowing them to input their own data and see the benefits firsthand.
The Future of Content Marketing
As buyers’ preferences change, approaches will continue to shift, and your content will have to adapt. A recent survey from Madison Logic and The Harris Poll highlights key B2B marketing predictions and trends that are shaping the future of content marketing, uncovering how businesses will need to adjust their strategies across the funnel to stay ahead.
- Artificial intelligence: 60% of B2B marketers are planning to invest more in Artificial Intelligence [AI] tools in 2025.
An AI ABM strategy can enhance your content marketing by enabling personalized, scalable engagement across the entire funnel. However, it’s crucial to maintain high-quality content by training AI on your brand’s voice and managing data integrity, as AI solutions often rely on large datasets.
- Video content: 53% of B2B marketers plan to leverage more video in their strategies in 2025.
Video marketing is a powerful tool for engaging prospects, easily shared across channels like social media, email, and connected TV. Tailoring videos for specific accounts or personas enhances ABM strategies, ensuring messages resonate with the right audience at the right time.
- Social media marketing: 60% of B2B marketers plan to allocate more budget to social media advertising and 64% said that they plan to take a B2C approach on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Social media platforms, including TikTok and Instagram, offer a powerful way to engage target accounts and build awareness, especially with younger millennial buyers. With personalized posts, videos, and targeted ads, social media can be leveraged in ABM strategies to connect with key prospects at the right moments in their journey.
Madison Logic Empowers Your Marketing Content
Effectively reaching target accounts at every stage of the funnel requires smart ABM strategies. By aligning your content with the needs of each stage, you can drive engagement, spark interest, and ultimately guide prospects toward making a decision.
The ML Platform empowers marketers to track target accounts throughout the funnel with multi-channel activation. This allows you to surround all members of the buying group with tailored messaging to drive engagement and demand. Paired with Madison Logic’s market-leading intent data, ML Insights then helps you uncover the topics that speak to your audience, enabling you to create impactful content marketing campaigns that engage accounts at the right time.
Request a demo to learn more about how Madison Logic can help you to deliver the best content and messaging at every stage of the funnel.
